Ordinary Nothing

I practically always send email messages in English. Most of the people I know send email messages in English. From my side, it’s part a natural aversion (Out of habit? Too much programming and dealing with software?) to seeing non-Latin letters on a computer screen, and part the appalling lack of standards to do otherwise.

(That’s technical standards, as in how mail servers and mail readers handle things like Hebrew text. Some don’t, some badly, some very well only there are several different ways to do so and they don’t quite match. The end result is that usually reading an Hebrew email message requires some, or a lot of, work on the recipient’s end, and even then success is not entirely guaranteed.)



In any case, when I send someone here an email in English, they usually tend to reply in English, regardless of whether they prefer to use Hebrew or English themselves. And if they put in a word in Hebrew, it’s usually done in Latin characters, but quoted to indicate so. Not that for most words it’s possible to misunderstand.



Most…



I got a reply message today from a certain M, who is a friend of my very good friend V. (And M, in the highly unlikely chance that you’re reading this, just to make it absolutely clear, I am NOT making fun of you here, I am making fun of me here).

The reply was of course, like my original message, in English. All the way.

and ended with (names truncated to protect the guilty):

Thanks again and dash to V



M

At which point I’ve gotten a bit confused. Oh, alright, more than a bit. I tried to imagine what could she possibly mean by that…

The first thing that came to mind is that I was requested to send V an email with a dash (i.e. the “-” character) in it. Which made very little sense. I toyed for a few seconds with the idea of sending a message like

Hi, V!

M asked me to say – for her

Yours,

   Yaron

But decided I’d just get myself severely beaten (Is very violent, my V), and rightfully so. Scrap that idea.



The second thing was that I’m expected to drop everything and run to visit V. But while I do get to see V quite a lot on some weeks, being told to dash to her sounds very odd, and the writing style M used didn’t match. If I hadn’t spoked to V yesterday evening I might have thought something important had happened, and that I really need to go quickly. But I did, so I didn’t (Don’t you just love it when a sentence like that can actually make sense?).



Next idea was that maybe M just intended to say that she cut the message at that point since she is directly going to see V. That would be bad syntax, but not unheard of. The time frame was all wrong for that, though, as they didn’t meet last night or this morning.



At which point I’ve gotten totally stumped. Was this some clever paraphrase of the “dashed to pieces” idea? I like this usage idea enough to try and use a variation myself someday, but it would have been totally out of context here. So that’s very unlikely, and again not at all in M’s writing style up to that point.



Starting to consider replying to the message and asking (which is a big no-no, since I either admit to being an idiot that can’t understand a sentence, or imply that M is an idiot that can’t write one), the truth finally hit me.

dash wasn’t a word in English. It was in Hebrew. But it seemed natural enough to M to use it instead of an English equivalent, and to not bother quoting it.

There’s an acronym in Hebrew, pronounced like dash is, with the general meaning of sending one’s regards. The sentence could have been “Thanks again and my regards to V“, or something of the sort.

Writing in Hebrew there couldn’t have been a mistake. Acronyms are always marked as such (e.g. you would never write AFAIK, but rather AFAI”K). On a spoken conversation there also couldn’t have been a mistake, since the only other word which is pronounced the same makes even less sense than all the English versions above, unless maybe you’re an insanely focused tailor.



Problem solved.

I’m not at all certain if I should feel stupid or not. This usage is after all very common in Hebrew. And I usually do very well in spotting English words, phrases and idioms used during conversations in Hebrew… Noticing that the reverse doesn’t hold true in all cases is, well, troubling.



Oh, well. I’ll just avoid writing Native Speaker for any language in my future CVs… ;-)

October 12th, 2004 at 12:38 EET | Categories: Language | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.